Aren't these inherently directly conflicting goals?
Easy to manage, is you change one little thing in your puppet config and puppet magically makes it happen, instead of having to babysit everything.
Easy to manage is someone tells you "make/etc/apache2/apache2.conf look exactly like this" instead of "click on the 2nd icon from the right that looks like two mating centipedes, then look randomly about the screen until you find the icon that looks like a discarded kleenex, oh you're seeing an icon that looks like a black hole, well, then click two pages back" etc for about ten minutes.
No, they are not conflicting goals.
How do I put this gently... there is... *ahem* plenty of room to add value to open source projects. If you get my drift. Take Visual SVN Server for example. They didn't remove svnadmin, and you don't even need to know apache is there for the most part.
Also, I can't think of any case where Puppet makes managing a single instance of something easier. At best it is as difficult as doing the underlying work yourself. It solves a different problem, of managing looooooooots of things. A command line interface also has little or nothing to do with Puppet. You picked a bad example, Puppet would actually work better with programatic interfaces to all it manages, NOT some clunky CLI or configuration files. Good lord, I'm sure the LAST thing The Puppet devs want are more messy config syntaxes to manage. Dropping in whole config files like you said is not the ideal Puppet way of doing things, and the config has to be developed the first time anyway. That's just a kludge we have to use because so many things lack usable management interfaces.
There's no reason a program can't have more than one management interface, and not be a chore to configure.
Guessing positions in an Euclidean plane based on less-than-descriptive tips contained on pictograms and labels isn't something we can call "concise" and "consistent".
Look, I'm going to be nice and only ask that you reread that to yourself a few times.
Think about stdout. And pictograms... really man.. pick up a book on Japanese sometime. What do you interact with in the real world, bundles of letters?? There is nothing inherently more or less concise about CLI or GUI.
I would argue this is not a new idea. The same basic concept exists in Android as Intents.
Windows is so stupidly far ahead of Android and Linux when it comes to sharing rich data between applications, you'd have to have your head deep up your arse to not know that, if you knew anything about this topic.
By "same basic concept" we could also include "open with X" menu entries or registering file types with applications, attaching an 'open' verb to regular files. None of these are the same, and "the basic concept" probably existed before you were born if you want to be that generic.
Agreed, the current implementation sucks, and it has to be coaxed into using a SSD as opposed to a thumb drive too. My point is it is so danged close... I don't understand why MS stopped with it where they did.
Short term solution I'd propose is.. why do people avoid low power / sleep states so much in Windows? They need to fix that..
Not sure I'm feeling the love for this concept. On the reads, sure. Nice idea. Writes however, not feeling the love.
You wouldn't do that, you would cache writes to RAM like you do now. If you NEED multiple gigs of write cache, stop running that application on a desktop...
so while using it as a cache (as long as the cache is ALWAYS backed up like Readyboost) sounds fine i really can't see recommending an SSD until they get the bugs out. you would have to spend all your time running back ups or RAIDing the drive constantly to remove the risk, and that is just more trouble than its worth. Besides with Superfetch and Readyboost if you have a large amount of RAM (and what geek don't right? hell even my netbook is gonna have 6Gb on it) then everything you use often is already preloaded into RAM so unless you boot daily i doubt you'd see much difference, as nothing yet beats RAM speed.
The idea is you're unlikely to find 64+G of ram in a desktop, and it could potentially be persistent. Backups and RAID have nothing to do with this, a SSD used as page cache can have a failed read or write at any time and the OS wil just move on.
I think they make perfect sense as a page cache in desktop systems.
Intel is doing the very same thing on their most recent "enthusiast" desktop chipsets.
For systems using the Linux kernel, there are software implementations of the very same block-level-caching-concept available - one I stumbled over is http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/
... Make no mistake, this should be the job of the operating system. Solaris has zfs l2arc, and Windows has ReadyBoost that is similar. Windows and Mac systems both ship with the big disk little SSD pattern. MS and Apple need to get off their asses and ship 'SSD as cache' software like Sun did. Only reason I can think of for not doing this is patent disputes, some angle that makes this not feasible for desktop use, or an intentional long term strategy to drive SSD costs down by poising them as spinning disk replacements rather than complements. Ok, for Apple that last one actually makes sense.. but Microsoft? They already have ReadyBoost.. I don't get it.
Windows ReadyBoost would work about the same way as ZFS's l2ARC if it allowed using whole SSDs instead of flash drives. It's basically the same idea, a second level page cache that can be removed or fail at any time.
Why desktop PCs continue to be built with the 'one large spinning disk one small SSD for important stuff' design while desktop operating systems totally ignore the potential of using them as cache boggles my mind.. I swear it is a conspiracy to make people buy larger SSDs than necessary instead of a more sensible blend of cost/performance like what Sun was after.
For entry to moderate level DIY or craft, the main difference between an amateur and a professional is the productivity: i.e. how much time it takes the professional and his consistency in result.
Most people would say that is a measure of quality.
What is wrong with the BIOS anyway? Why does the boot process need to be all flashy? It seems like adding complexity there will just end up causing problems...
Maybe I'm just a relic...a lot of people don't even know how to get into their BIOS anymore, let alone what the POST and such is afterwards.
So... minutes of boot time spent at "press Fwhatever to enter foo" prompts is apealing to you? Or on the desktop side, figuring out how BIOS and one or more operating systems enumerate possible boot devices is good enough?
For a Linux user, all the weird crap you've ever had to do in grub or lilo's configuration will get reduced to something like OS X's bless command, or an intelligent boot menu like refit at least.
If you guys have no experience with other things like OpenBoot or don't understand BIOS limitations, you are not going to contribute much to this discussion. The article DOES describe what UEFI does and there are systems out there with better-than-BIOS firmware like Sparcs and EFI Macs already, and they have been available for yeeeeeeears. So don't poo on the article or the tech before educating yourselves.
All the companies that switch to CentOS, fine with me - but play nice, and buy at least 1 support contract/license from Red Hat. It's a nice way of saying thanks to the main company doing all the hard work.
That's a way of saying thanks for seeding my yum-rhn-plugin/reposync that updates untold numbers of unsubscribed RHEL systems. Not that using CentOS is mooching any less.
In fact, Linux has had the capability to use (U)EFI for years.
I know there are going to be a lot of nodding bobble heads here, but I'm sure we both know the quality of Linux user land depends very much on other OSs making it look bad. Pride is the currency of free software.
EFI support in Linux needs its carrot on a stick... to say the least.
No key, no boot. Replacing drives or using external drives does not help. There is no "BIOS Reset" option and you can't short jumpers to clear it.
Google uses it on the CR-48 Chromebooks, but also includes a little switch under the battery to turn it off. With it turned on, the system boots only Google-signed images and nothing else. Period.
Why wouldn't any other manufacturer do the same thing? A lot of people here are bashing Microsoft when clearly it's up to the UEFI implementation to be reasonably sane.
At the same time we have too many trusted CAs I've heard others claim.
Hogwash
Big CAs can use multiple intermediate keys to spread the risk. Browser and OS vendors are the first link in the chain of trust, they have more than enough sway to demand levels of risk acceptable to them. You are the next link, complain to your browser / OS vendor and raise a stink. They'll demand stronger audits or contracts. Money talks folks.
There's nothing wrong with a chain of trust, or you wouldn't be trusting anything else you receive at retail, software or otherwise. The Internet just needs to grow the fuck up.
Last I checked, issuing currency to enable commerce was a responsibility of the government. The US government has been utterly failing to create electronic currency for about 30 years now, preferring to let insurance companies and usurers create a ridiculously insecure, non-interoperable systems, all the while dragging down the economy with transaction fees, so they can get campaign contributions from them.
This is the responsibility of the government. Give us electronic currency already!
... they do provide a currency, the USD, and a standard way of sending it from institution to institution, ACH. Moving money around more rapidly than that does not require a new currency or the government.
It might be GPL'd, but what about involved patents? Considering how Oracle is playing, I'm mentioning the P word isn't entirely FUD:(
What about the patents Linux What about the patents Windows What about the patents OS X What about the patents.NET What about the patents Java What about the patents etc.
Is this the new "think of the children"? Patents are everywhere. Oracle is well defended, so are the others. Take your pick and move on.
100 utter and total fools, with no regard for there own life, ran *toward* rather than *away* from a leaking fuel line, to collect a bucket or cup of fuel. Some of these *complete idiots* were even stupid enough to be smoking while collecting the highly flammable fuel, and some topped even that astounding level of moronic sensibility by allowing children to accompany them, when any normal human with a shred of decency in his heart would have at least driven the soon to be doomed youths far away.. A supreme imbecile amongst them threw his glowing cigarette butt into a pool of fuel collecting in a sewer, tragically earning the Darwin award for them all.
There, you bleeding hearts, how do you like my take on the situation?
What really amazes me is how this ^ and religious social conservatives can be on the same team.
This lets you back up your data to a drive on the other side of the planet. Because offsite copies at your house aren't enough, you must plan for a comet strike.
There is so, so much more to backups than that. With those and quite a lot of scripting you approach something reasonable. Those tools alone give you no management whatsoever of your backup data. That's fine if you really don't care and are happy to check off some "We do backups" box. You also forgot a critical piece.
The find command. You probably don't do recoveries much...
You're working with a dataset that the find command isn't best suited for. Rsync doesn't scan a filesystem with the same intent backup software has. For example, if it cannot traverse a directory, that is a giant red flag error for backup software because an unknown quantity of data was missed. I bet you hadn't even though about what failure scenarios rsync might have until just now. Cron only works if you will never have resource contention. No management of data policies, how many copies, from when, where, until when, resource management etc, etc... No - at rest - compression or encryption.
You have to laugh a little... but it's not a bad idea
Apple: Resume from low power reliably.. quickly Power buttons sleep by default Users tolerate very short default sleep timers because of the fast resume. Saves lotsa power. Portable systems default with SafeSleep on.. writes hibernation data, !quickly!, prior to entering low power mode, resumes from the faster available method - in case battery runs out in low power mode. Desktops can optionally use it, great in case of unreliable power Replaced hibernation with a better sleep & transparent hibernation, users trust/use sleep
Microsoft: Windows resume from low power state has bad track record Hibernation is a roll of the dice, slow as shutdown Microsoft understandably cannot change user opinion/momentum Make hibernation "look like" power off.. log out users, etc. No need to copy Apple's fast hibernate because users don't expect shutdown to be instant, but they could Replaced shutdown with hibernation in shutdown clothing
programs with minimally useful command line invocations, extension languages are the 'glue logic' you get(observe your local Office guru's bludgeoning about of VBscript, or some photo-pro's slightly alarming Photoshop batch processing abilities); but the unix 'flavor' has historically been that the shell, rather than the program extension language, has been the tool of choice for bodging jobs too big to tackle manually but to small to be worth delving into the guts of the programs themselves.
I think that is sort of sad. Take VBA for example. From the windows script host you can create office objects, manipulate them, and send out through outlook, from one script.
Now, you can accomplish that with the UNIX model, but it's clunky as hell. Two streams of uni-directional unstructured data, everything is stateless, command switches cannot be discovered at runtime in a sane manner, and error reporting is often simply 0/1. Going forward, few people are really designing applications to any of that. Modern Linux apps usually lack documented exit codes, lack the ability to do anything useful to stdin, DO often have reasonable argument parsing, but often output text that is unnecessarily difficult to parse. Gnome & KDE apps are AFAIK still instrumented differently, and command line apps haven't adopted either system as any kind of standard.
BASH doesn't need to lose for standardized program instrumentation to win. BASH would benefit greatly from things like argument/method discovery, typed & structured IO, etc. At some point you have to drop notions of KISS and design things from an updated holistic view of the world. Simple should be from the user's perspective, because isn't it an engineer's job more or less to make complex things work for normal people?
Furthermore, the information was "leaked" by the Guardian's careless publication of a password. Wikileaks officially publishing them now in an easily searchable form means anyone at risk has the ability to check for themselves if their names are mentioned - the bad guys have had the cables since at least last week, if not for the last few months following the publication of the password in February.
It was encrypted _once_ with a symmetric key algorithm apparently, and the same encrypted data was distributed to multiple parties and the whole Internet, as an insurance policy.
_S_t_u_p_i_d_
If Wikileaks REALLY cared that this would happen (they didn't) they would have encrypted it with a different symmetric key per recipient, or used a PKI system.
I'm not going to add to all the "journalists shouldn't be expected to understand crypto" malarky. They were told the password was temporary which would have been true if their cipher text wasn't spread to the far corners of the Internet. Since it was all encrypted with the same key, who knows who spread the data, it does't even matter. Bad crypto practice, BAD!
Everyone wondering "who really torrented the symmetrically encrypted data" is a retard. The word "Guardian" could have been put in the passphrase, problem solved. Trust me, WL did not give a shit that this would eventually happen.
the bad guys have had the cables since at least last week
I like how "bad guys" getting the data matters only when you think the buck can be safely passed. Hilarious. Before this it was all "good guys" reading it right?
I've heard that their Big Serious Expensive has its points; but every interaction with HP software that I've had down at the "commodity x86s and their peripherals" level has filled me with an unquenchable desire for bloody vengeance
I hear you, but have you experienced SAP's, Oracle's, or I'll imagine IBM's enterprise business software?
I know that hardware's margins don't keep the Wall street boys happy; but what sort of insanity could convince HP that they are a software company?
From what you've described so far, they may be ahead of the competition.
I mean if you haven't had an insatiable urge to off a coworker for the sport of it after navigating the support website, it might be pretty good software in comparison.
It's kind of like how town cars and limos would still be here if they were really hard to drive. The drivers aren't the customer.
what a sorry place we've come to as a species if every time someone has the drive, passion and concentration required to do something extraordinary like this they're labeled as having some kind of disorder.
Michelangelo? Asperger's definitely, right?
I reproduced the Mona Lisa on my graphing calculator, and also have a mental condition that causes nerd-like behavior. Where's MY fanfare?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. This is a slashvertisement, so lower that pedestal a notch or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't these inherently directly conflicting goals?
Easy to manage, is you change one little thing in your puppet config and puppet magically makes it happen, instead of having to babysit everything.
Easy to manage is someone tells you "make /etc/apache2/apache2.conf look exactly like this" instead of "click on the 2nd icon from the right that looks like two mating centipedes, then look randomly about the screen until you find the icon that looks like a discarded kleenex, oh you're seeing an icon that looks like a black hole, well, then click two pages back" etc for about ten minutes.
No, they are not conflicting goals.
How do I put this gently... there is... *ahem* plenty of room to add value to open source projects. If you get my drift. Take Visual SVN Server for example. They didn't remove svnadmin, and you don't even need to know apache is there for the most part.
Also, I can't think of any case where Puppet makes managing a single instance of something easier. At best it is as difficult as doing the underlying work yourself. It solves a different problem, of managing looooooooots of things. A command line interface also has little or nothing to do with Puppet. You picked a bad example, Puppet would actually work better with programatic interfaces to all it manages, NOT some clunky CLI or configuration files. Good lord, I'm sure the LAST thing The Puppet devs want are more messy config syntaxes to manage. Dropping in whole config files like you said is not the ideal Puppet way of doing things, and the config has to be developed the first time anyway. That's just a kludge we have to use because so many things lack usable management interfaces.
There's no reason a program can't have more than one management interface, and not be a chore to configure.
Guessing positions in an Euclidean plane based on less-than-descriptive tips contained on pictograms and labels isn't something we can call "concise" and "consistent".
Look, I'm going to be nice and only ask that you reread that to yourself a few times.
Think about stdout. And pictograms... really man.. pick up a book on Japanese sometime. What do you interact with in the real world, bundles of letters?? There is nothing inherently more or less concise about CLI or GUI.
I would argue this is not a new idea. The same basic concept exists in Android as Intents.
Windows is so stupidly far ahead of Android and Linux when it comes to sharing rich data between applications, you'd have to have your head deep up your arse to not know that, if you knew anything about this topic.
By "same basic concept" we could also include "open with X" menu entries or registering file types with applications, attaching an 'open' verb to regular files. None of these are the same, and "the basic concept" probably existed before you were born if you want to be that generic.
"but this isnt persistent over reboots"
Agreed, the current implementation sucks, and it has to be coaxed into using a SSD as opposed to a thumb drive too. My point is it is so danged close... I don't understand why MS stopped with it where they did.
Short term solution I'd propose is.. why do people avoid low power / sleep states so much in Windows? They need to fix that..
Not sure I'm feeling the love for this concept. On the reads, sure. Nice idea. Writes however, not feeling the love.
You wouldn't do that, you would cache writes to RAM like you do now. If you NEED multiple gigs of write cache, stop running that application on a desktop...
so while using it as a cache (as long as the cache is ALWAYS backed up like Readyboost) sounds fine i really can't see recommending an SSD until they get the bugs out. you would have to spend all your time running back ups or RAIDing the drive constantly to remove the risk, and that is just more trouble than its worth. Besides with Superfetch and Readyboost if you have a large amount of RAM (and what geek don't right? hell even my netbook is gonna have 6Gb on it) then everything you use often is already preloaded into RAM so unless you boot daily i doubt you'd see much difference, as nothing yet beats RAM speed.
The idea is you're unlikely to find 64+G of ram in a desktop, and it could potentially be persistent. Backups and RAID have nothing to do with this, a SSD used as page cache can have a failed read or write at any time and the OS wil just move on.
I think they make perfect sense as a page cache in desktop systems.
Intel is doing the very same thing on their most recent "enthusiast" desktop chipsets.
For systems using the Linux kernel, there are software implementations of the very same block-level-caching-concept available - one I stumbled over is http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/
... Make no mistake, this should be the job of the operating system. Solaris has zfs l2arc, and Windows has ReadyBoost that is similar. Windows and Mac systems both ship with the big disk little SSD pattern. MS and Apple need to get off their asses and ship 'SSD as cache' software like Sun did. Only reason I can think of for not doing this is patent disputes, some angle that makes this not feasible for desktop use, or an intentional long term strategy to drive SSD costs down by poising them as spinning disk replacements rather than complements. Ok, for Apple that last one actually makes sense.. but Microsoft? They already have ReadyBoost.. I don't get it.
Windows ReadyBoost would work about the same way as ZFS's l2ARC if it allowed using whole SSDs instead of flash drives. It's basically the same idea, a second level page cache that can be removed or fail at any time.
Why desktop PCs continue to be built with the 'one large spinning disk one small SSD for important stuff' design while desktop operating systems totally ignore the potential of using them as cache boggles my mind.. I swear it is a conspiracy to make people buy larger SSDs than necessary instead of a more sensible blend of cost/performance like what Sun was after.
For entry to moderate level DIY or craft, the main difference between an amateur and a professional is the productivity: i.e. how much time it takes the professional and his consistency in result.
Most people would say that is a measure of quality.
OS X uses GPT.
What is wrong with the BIOS anyway? Why does the boot process need to be all flashy? It seems like adding complexity there will just end up causing problems...
Maybe I'm just a relic...a lot of people don't even know how to get into their BIOS anymore, let alone what the POST and such is afterwards.
So... minutes of boot time spent at "press Fwhatever to enter foo" prompts is apealing to you?
Or on the desktop side, figuring out how BIOS and one or more operating systems enumerate possible boot devices is good enough?
For a Linux user, all the weird crap you've ever had to do in grub or lilo's configuration will get reduced to something like OS X's bless command, or an intelligent boot menu like refit at least.
If you guys have no experience with other things like OpenBoot or don't understand BIOS limitations, you are not going to contribute much to this discussion. The article DOES describe what UEFI does and there are systems out there with better-than-BIOS firmware like Sparcs and EFI Macs already, and they have been available for yeeeeeeears. So don't poo on the article or the tech before educating yourselves.
All the companies that switch to CentOS, fine with me - but play nice, and buy at least 1 support contract/license from Red Hat. It's a nice way of saying thanks to the main company doing all the hard work.
That's a way of saying thanks for seeding my yum-rhn-plugin/reposync that updates untold numbers of unsubscribed RHEL systems. Not that using CentOS is mooching any less.
In fact, Linux has had the capability to use (U)EFI for years.
I know there are going to be a lot of nodding bobble heads here, but I'm sure we both know the quality of Linux user land depends very much on other OSs making it look bad. Pride is the currency of free software.
EFI support in Linux needs its carrot on a stick... to say the least.
No key, no boot. Replacing drives or using external drives does not help. There is no "BIOS Reset" option and you can't short jumpers to clear it.
Google uses it on the CR-48 Chromebooks, but also includes a little switch under the battery to turn it off. With it turned on, the system boots only Google-signed images and nothing else. Period.
Why wouldn't any other manufacturer do the same thing? A lot of people here are bashing Microsoft when clearly it's up to the UEFI implementation to be reasonably sane.
At the same time we have too many trusted CAs I've heard others claim.
Hogwash
Big CAs can use multiple intermediate keys to spread the risk. Browser and OS vendors are the first link in the chain of trust, they have more than enough sway to demand levels of risk acceptable to them. You are the next link, complain to your browser / OS vendor and raise a stink. They'll demand stronger audits or contracts. Money talks folks.
There's nothing wrong with a chain of trust, or you wouldn't be trusting anything else you receive at retail, software or otherwise. The Internet just needs to grow the fuck up.
Self regulate or be regulated, plain and simple.
Last I checked, issuing currency to enable commerce was a responsibility of the government. The US government has been utterly failing to create electronic currency for about 30 years now, preferring to let insurance companies and usurers create a ridiculously insecure, non-interoperable systems, all the while dragging down the economy with transaction fees, so they can get campaign contributions from them.
This is the responsibility of the government. Give us electronic currency already!
... they do provide a currency, the USD, and a standard way of sending it from institution to institution, ACH. Moving money around more rapidly than that does not require a new currency or the government.
Duh.
It might be GPL'd, but what about involved patents? Considering how Oracle is playing, I'm mentioning the P word isn't entirely FUD :(
What about the patents Linux .NET
What about the patents Windows
What about the patents OS X
What about the patents
What about the patents Java
What about the patents etc.
Is this the new "think of the children"? Patents are everywhere. Oracle is well defended, so are the others. Take your pick and move on.
100 utter and total fools, with no regard for there own life, ran *toward* rather than *away* from a leaking fuel line, to collect a bucket or cup of fuel. Some of these *complete idiots* were even stupid enough to be smoking while collecting the highly flammable fuel, and some topped even that astounding level of moronic sensibility by allowing children to accompany them, when any normal human with a shred of decency in his heart would have at least driven the soon to be doomed youths far away.. A supreme imbecile amongst them threw his glowing cigarette butt into a pool of fuel collecting in a sewer, tragically earning the Darwin award for them all.
There, you bleeding hearts, how do you like my take on the situation?
What really amazes me is how this ^ and religious social conservatives can be on the same team.
And every other product is just a rehash of this.
rsync
ssh
cron
This lets you back up your data to a drive on the other side of the planet. Because offsite copies at your house aren't enough, you must plan for a comet strike.
There is so, so much more to backups than that. With those and quite a lot of scripting you approach something reasonable. Those tools alone give you no management whatsoever of your backup data. That's fine if you really don't care and are happy to check off some "We do backups" box. You also forgot a critical piece.
The find command. You probably don't do recoveries much...
You're working with a dataset that the find command isn't best suited for.
Rsync doesn't scan a filesystem with the same intent backup software has. For example, if it cannot traverse a directory, that is a giant red flag error for backup software because an unknown quantity of data was missed. I bet you hadn't even though about what failure scenarios rsync might have until just now.
Cron only works if you will never have resource contention.
No management of data policies, how many copies, from when, where, until when, resource management etc, etc...
No - at rest - compression or encryption.
You have to laugh a little... but it's not a bad idea
Apple:
Resume from low power reliably.. quickly
Power buttons sleep by default
Users tolerate very short default sleep timers because of the fast resume. Saves lotsa power.
Portable systems default with SafeSleep on.. writes hibernation data, !quickly!, prior to entering low power mode, resumes from the faster available method - in case battery runs out in low power mode.
Desktops can optionally use it, great in case of unreliable power
Replaced hibernation with a better sleep & transparent hibernation, users trust/use sleep
Microsoft:
Windows resume from low power state has bad track record
Hibernation is a roll of the dice, slow as shutdown
Microsoft understandably cannot change user opinion/momentum
Make hibernation "look like" power off.. log out users, etc.
No need to copy Apple's fast hibernate because users don't expect shutdown to be instant, but they could
Replaced shutdown with hibernation in shutdown clothing
It is clever, I'll give them that.
programs with minimally useful command line invocations, extension languages are the 'glue logic' you get(observe your local Office guru's bludgeoning about of VBscript, or some photo-pro's slightly alarming Photoshop batch processing abilities); but the unix 'flavor' has historically been that the shell, rather than the program extension language, has been the tool of choice for bodging jobs too big to tackle manually but to small to be worth delving into the guts of the programs themselves.
I think that is sort of sad. Take VBA for example. From the windows script host you can create office objects, manipulate them, and send out through outlook, from one script.
Now, you can accomplish that with the UNIX model, but it's clunky as hell. Two streams of uni-directional unstructured data, everything is stateless, command switches cannot be discovered at runtime in a sane manner, and error reporting is often simply 0/1. Going forward, few people are really designing applications to any of that. Modern Linux apps usually lack documented exit codes, lack the ability to do anything useful to stdin, DO often have reasonable argument parsing, but often output text that is unnecessarily difficult to parse. Gnome & KDE apps are AFAIK still instrumented differently, and command line apps haven't adopted either system as any kind of standard.
BASH doesn't need to lose for standardized program instrumentation to win. BASH would benefit greatly from things like argument/method discovery, typed & structured IO, etc. At some point you have to drop notions of KISS and design things from an updated holistic view of the world. Simple should be from the user's perspective, because isn't it an engineer's job more or less to make complex things work for normal people?
Furthermore, the information was "leaked" by the Guardian's careless publication of a password. Wikileaks officially publishing them now in an easily searchable form means anyone at risk has the ability to check for themselves if their names are mentioned - the bad guys have had the cables since at least last week, if not for the last few months following the publication of the password in February.
It was encrypted _once_ with a symmetric key algorithm apparently, and the same encrypted data was distributed to multiple parties and the whole Internet, as an insurance policy.
_S_t_u_p_i_d_
If Wikileaks REALLY cared that this would happen (they didn't) they would have encrypted it with a different symmetric key per recipient, or used a PKI system.
I'm not going to add to all the "journalists shouldn't be expected to understand crypto" malarky. They were told the password was temporary which would have been true if their cipher text wasn't spread to the far corners of the Internet. Since it was all encrypted with the same key, who knows who spread the data, it does't even matter. Bad crypto practice, BAD!
Everyone wondering "who really torrented the symmetrically encrypted data" is a retard. The word "Guardian" could have been put in the passphrase, problem solved. Trust me, WL did not give a shit that this would eventually happen.
the bad guys have had the cables since at least last week
I like how "bad guys" getting the data matters only when you think the buck can be safely passed. Hilarious.
Before this it was all "good guys" reading it right?
I've heard that their Big Serious Expensive has its points; but every interaction with HP software that I've had down at the "commodity x86s and their peripherals" level has filled me with an unquenchable desire for bloody vengeance
I hear you, but have you experienced SAP's, Oracle's, or I'll imagine IBM's enterprise business software?
I know that hardware's margins don't keep the Wall street boys happy; but what sort of insanity could convince HP that they are a software company?
From what you've described so far, they may be ahead of the competition.
I mean if you haven't had an insatiable urge to off a coworker for the sport of it after navigating the support website, it might be pretty good software in comparison.
It's kind of like how town cars and limos would still be here if they were really hard to drive. The drivers aren't the customer.
what a sorry place we've come to as a species if every time someone has the drive, passion and concentration required to do something extraordinary like this they're labeled as having some kind of disorder.
Michelangelo? Asperger's definitely, right?
I reproduced the Mona Lisa on my graphing calculator, and also have a mental condition that causes nerd-like behavior. Where's MY fanfare?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. This is a slashvertisement, so lower that pedestal a notch or two.
as a species
Hang on, I'm wiping the tears from my eyes.
This was actually live streamed by Notch on his mobile phone.
... and it gave me a headache. So, neat.